If its any consolation, as a dev, I wrestle with a lot of this myself. The way the relay servers work, and the disparity in how clients interact with them will often (most of the time) yield inconsistent results particularly between apps.

As a user I end of just having to wade through multiple apps and acknowledge I'll probably never see all replies, reactions or know who zapped me etc (lightning wallets and nwc are another issue of inconsistency)

I fear that mitigating this over the long term may lead to either centralization to nostr platforms like Primal and ZBD which will produce a better experience there, but silo off from nostr as a whole.. or put more demands on app developers to create robust caching themselves and background tasks to retry pulling/pushing events from/to relays that have draconian throttle policies or are not as stable as they make themselves out to be.

The thing is, users shouldnt need to be doing so much configuration of their clients, and constantly checking relay settings, or having to login and authorize and reauthorize connections. There's frictions that are unnecessary that add to the poor experience outcomes.

But one thing is for certain.. devs, myself included, need to set aside more dedicated time in the analysis, debugging, and address some tech debt to make their apps run a little smoother.

It'd also be super helpful for devs of nostr-tools and NDK to document actual good flows for how best to use them. Both of their docs barely scratch the surface.

With each passing year nostr has and can do more, but it does feel to me that 2023 was the best for overall UX.